This is a 4-year-old review on Letterboxd on the last moving image work by Jonas Mekas; it was, unfortunately, according to my knowledge, never screened again after its run at New York’s The Shed.

by TWY

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It’s not surprising that Requiem, Jonas Mekas’s final film, commissioned by The Shed and accompanies a new recording of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem, would be a poem about nature, flowers, trees, his “paradise,” and ultimately, the destruction and the rebirth of the world as we know it. According to Amy Taubin’s article published on Artforum after Mekas passed away, he was working on the film with his editor Elle Burchill up until the last day of his life. Thank you, Jonas, for this little gift of film, although you are no longer with us.

Satisfying my personal fetish about a certain French publication, the film’s release fits well with recent April issue of Cahiers du cinéma, which, in Godard’s word (October issue) a “langage” of its own, focuses on the herbs, flowers, and trees in movies. Mekas’ 1969 diary film masterpiece Walden is among some sixty movies cited in the issue. Amaryllis (Hippeastrum) was the flower that’s cited, complete with two beautiful 16mm stills. So, it is not surprising to see that he returned to the subject of plants, although this time around shot in digital and video, still equally glorious and pure as they were under the lens of his famous Bolex. I would never know exactly how many different kinds of flowers were shown in the picture, but even without getting into vegetal studies, the film is nonetheless gorgeous.

But as Verdi’s sorrowful opera bursts into our ears, the film seems to be also creating a strange narrative. The film opens with the camera eerily staring at a TV screen, which shows a Queens neighborhood on fire, and later, Mekas cut to another recording of a Japanese channel, showing the horrific aftermath of the 2011 Earthquake in Tokyo. More surprisingly, totally out of Mekas’ character, the film is almost completely without people. Mekas was famous for filming almost everybody of the 1960s New York avant-garde scene. He was also the one responsible for creating the movement and preserving its legacy in the first place. But they had nothing to do with this film. Occasionally, pedestrians can be seen, but they appeared ghostly, ignored by the camera’s focus. The only real images of people that appeared in the film are that of old photographs, which showcases the violence throughout our contemporary history, including the infamous 1993 photograph “The vulture and the little girl” by Kevin Carter. 

It seems to made Requiem the most pessimistic film Mekas ever made. Whether they are recorded TV news program, or old photographs, by showing their respective presentational form (television or photo), Mekas undeniably put things in the past tense. You see the pixels as the floods destroy oceanside houses, more the pixels than the images. You see the photo’s fading colors. Mekas would then use his own hand to block the photographs as if the apparatus is manifesting an internal disgust from the film-maker himself, against the brutality on screen. About some minutes into the film, all the above signs seem to be pointing towards one direction, at least in my mind, that is the human race’s ultimate destruction.

And so did Mekas, probably didn’t even have time to finish the picture, who suddenly departed from everything he loved in January. (He also didn’t record any of his iconic voiceovers.) In his work, he refers to such things, people and places as paradise. But the leftover of his imaginary apocalypse was nothing short of pure beauty: a hand’s caresses of a flower or the camera quickly passing through a field of sunflowers, or the camera dazzles at ivy invading a European ruin. In the final scene of his 2011 film Sleepless Night Stories, Mekas took his audience to a secret place, where the trees and bushes cast overwhelming greenness on screen. Some children entered his frame, playing ball game and chasing each other, sharing the beauty with the old cameraman. Everything man-made is doomed, but flowers and trees remain, a paradise rises from the ashes.